Oh dear. I
really didn't want my first blog post in a week to be yet another
one about global bloody warming. Problem is, if those lying, cheating
climate scientists will insist on going on lying and cheating what
else can I do other than expose their lying and cheating?

The story so
far: ten days ago a self-proclaimed "sceptical" climate
scientist named Professor Richard Muller of Berkeley University,
California, managed to grab himself some space in the Wall
Street Journal (of all places) claiming that the case for
global warming scepticism was over. Thanks to research from his
Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project, Professor Muller
stated confidently, we now know that the planet has warmed by almost
one degree centigrade since 1950. What's more, he told the BBC's
Today programme, there is no sign that this global warming has
slowed down.

Cue mass jubilation
from a number of media outlets which, perhaps, ought to have known
better – among them, the Independent, the Guardian, The Economist and Forbes magazine. To give you an idea of their self-righteous indignation
at the supposed ignorance of climate change deniers, here is the Washington
Post's Eugene Robinson in full spate:

We know
that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt
and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed
by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions
– the burning of fossil fuels by humans – as the cause.
And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists
have been both careful and honorable in their work.

Nobody’s
fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research
grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally
occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what
Cain says, the science is real.

Problem is,
Eugene, almost every word of those two paragraphs is plain wrong,
and your smugness embarrassingly misplaced.